[This is the third (and last) installment of my profile of Russian actor, director, and acting teacher Michael Chekhov. Part 3 begins with a discussion of Chekhov’s disappointment with his performing career in Germany, which may have spurred him on to his period of wandering in Europe before he decamped for England and finally the United States, where he eventually settled for the last 17 years of his life.
[As I said in my introduction
to Part 2 (posted on 5 November), I recommend all readers who have just discovered
“Michael Chekhov” on Rick On
Theater go back to Part 1 (2 November) and read the first two parts of this series.
I have defined, explained, and introduced words, terms, and names that
will show up again below and it will be hard to follow the train of thought
without that familiarity.]
There’s little record of Michael Chekhov’s German film work,
largely because of its nature as I noted in Part 2. His one title role, in Olga Tschechowa’s Der Narr seiner Liebe, was silent, and
his supporting work was largely silent, depriving him of his most powerful and compelling
attribute on the stage: his voice.
Furthermore, stage actors in Russia enjoyed almost cult status. seen not
merely as great artists but also as charismatic personalities They didn’t enjoy similar recognition outside
their home country, however. In
Chekhov’s case, the charisma which he’d been accorded in Moscow was a local
phenomenon, bound up in the national traditions of artistry and the innovation
that Russian theater experienced at the turn of the 20th century and didn’t
travel to a different cultural environment west of the Russian frontier..
Another reason, almost certainly linked to this fact, was
the actor’s own dismissal of the work as insubstantial. Some chroniclers of Chekhov’s life and career
assert that the slim record of this period—the Russian actor was little more
pleased with his stage work in Germany—was that it was so short. I suspect that it was brief because Chekhov
was displeased with his opportunities and critical reception.
According to Oksana Bulgakowa, a German professor of film
history and film analysis, Chekhov’s stage roles were “of the ‘stand and serve’
variety.” He accepted this in the hope
that Reinhardt would eventually let him do Shakespearean parts, but that never
happened. “‘The time’s not right,” the
impresario told him. “It’s not what
audiences want right now.” I sense he
was disappointed and found respite in traveling around Europe teaching and
directing rather than staying in Germany—where he could conceivably have been
quite comfortable since his former wife and daughter were living there
successfully; his current wife, Ksenia Karlovna, had roots there, and he had
Reinhardt as a kind of patron. Instead he
went wandering until he settled for a time in England before emigrating to the
United States.
All was not of no value, however. Out of his frustration and displeasure with
his German acting experiences, Chekhov made an important discovery, one that became
a central point in his acting theories.
In Life and Encounters, he describes
in great detail the agony through which he went to prepare to take over the
role of Skid in Vienna. The rehearsal
time was short and he was mostly drilled in his performance and lines by
Reinhardt’s assistant—the maestro himself didn’t arrive in Vienna until a few
days before the opening performance—and the disjointed rehearsals were chaotic
and perfunctory.
Dress rehearsal, the first time the cast worked at the
Theater an der Wien with full costumes, make-up, lighting, and sets—the
previous sessions had taken place in Reinhardt’s apartment—was the night before
the Vienna opening. Chekhov recounted,
“I could feel myself hurtling into a chasm and I was ashamed, sometimes getting
angry and sometimes sinking into apathy.”
At the dress rehearsal, the actor found himself thinking nostalgically
about his “beloved MAT and its atmosphere.”
At the opening performance,
Chekhov wrote, “I went on stage with a feeling of dull indifference.” He began hearing his own lines as he spoke
them as if he were in the audience. He’d
become “a spectator of my own acting.”
His “consciousness had split into two,” he realized. This became Chekhov’s principle of divided
consciousness, based on a Steiner concept of “lower I/ego” and “higher
I/ego.” In the words of Kirillov and
Merlin in their notes to The Path of the
Actor:
Both of these
essences co-exist and constantly fight against each other within every human
being. But although this process is
unconscious for the ordinary person, the artist has to relate to it
consciously, developing his sense of ‘individuality’ rather than
‘personality’. Chekhov’s belief was that
the ‘personal’, which is inappropriate for the realm of art, is always egoistic
and subjective; it might be effective as far as the audience is concerned, but
that effect is not artistic. The
‘individual’ is non-egoistic and objective, and it coincides with the ‘ideal’
realm of images and art. Chekhov
maintained that the idea of ‘temperament’ . . . resides in the sphere of the
‘personal’, and he denounced the ‘primal’ nature of its influence, maintaining
that with ‘temperament’ the actor achieves nothing on the stage except for
agitating his audience’s nerves.
Chekhov himself wrote:
In a gifted
person there is a constant struggle taking place between his higher and lower
Egos. Each of them is seeking to gain
the upper hand. The lower Ego, complete with its ambition, passions and
egotistical agitation is the victor in everyday life. However, the other Ego is (or should be) the
victor in the creative process. The
lower Ego is inclined to deny the existence of the higher Ego completely and to
attribute the latter’s powers, capabilities and qualities to itself. By contrast, the higher
Ego recognizes the existence of its double, but rejects its instincts of
enslavement and possession. It wants to
make the lower Ego the bearer of its
ideas, feelings and forces. So long as
the lower Ego says ‘I’, the higher Ego is condemned to silence, but it can free
itself of the lower Ego, abandon it and (partially) disengage from it, and then
the lower Ego is silenced and recedes. A
kind of division of consciousness occurs, with the higher Ego acting as the
source of inspiration and the lower Ego as the bearer, the agent.
The actor went into some detail
discussing this concept (which I won’t do; I touch on affective memory in “Realism
and Un-Realism”); it was an important notion for him because it was fundamental
to his rejection of one of Stanislavsky’s most basic acting techniques. Affective memory, also called emotional
memory, is an actor’s recall of an emotion or feeling from a situation from
his or her own life that is similar to one the character is experiencing and
transferring it to the moment being performed.
(This is related to Uta Hagen’s technique of “substitution”; she
discusses both emotional memory and substitution in Respect for Acting.)
So out of his dismal start in the
West, Michael Chekhov learned an invaluable lesson at the hands of Max Reinardt
and the commercial theater. Using Berlin
as a base of operations, Chekhov taught, performed, and directed around Western
Europe and the Baltics. This was known
as his period of wandering, during which he developed new techniques of acting
and directing.
Also operating around Europe and
beyond (Palestine, then a British mandate) from a base in Berlin was the
Hebrew-speaking theater troupe Habima, founded in Bialystock (then part of
Russia) in 1912. In 1918, Habima moved
to Moscow and became an adjunct of MAT (under the guidance of Evgeni
Vakhtangov). The troupe left the Soviet
Union in 1926, ostensibly on tour of Europe and the U.S., but in the face of
Soviet anti-Semitism and communism’s strident atheism, the members decided to
stay abroad.
Maintaining a base in Berlin, the
company invited Chekhov—whose mother, readers will recall, was Jewish—to direct
them in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night in
September 1931. Gordon characterizes the
production, presented as a light psychological comedy, as “airy” and
“un-Shakespearean” and adds, “Chekhov is praised as an experimental director
for the first time in the West.” (Gordon
had just reported that Berlin’s 8-Uhr-Abendblatt
[8 O’clock Evening Paper], a left-leaning daily newspaper, had called Chekhov
“one ‘of the greatest hopes of the modern western theatre.’”)
(Habima—the name means “the stage”
in Hebrew [ha = ‘the’; bima = ‘stage’]—so “the” Habima is a
tautology—remained in Western Europe, with visits to Palestine where several
members had already settled, until 1931 when it reestablished itself in Tel
Aviv and it built its own theater there in 1945—three years before Israel’s
independence. In 1958, the year the
company won the Israel Prize for theater, Habima Theatre, as it’s formally
called, was designated the national theater of Israel.)
In April 1931, the Chekhovs moved
to Paris to help form a Russian émigré theater called the Théâtre
Tchekhoff. (Note the French spelling of
Chekhov’s family name! Paris between
1917 and World War II was a refuge for Russian aristocracy, who had spoken
French in Russia and adopted French culture, and opponents to Soviet Marxism,
and had a famously large Russian émigé colony.)
The money to realize this project never came through.
In June, the émigré actor-director
staged and performed in a repertory that included Hamlet, Erik XIV, The Deluge, and Twelfth Night at the Théâtre de l’Atelier in Paris’s bohemian art
quarter, Montmartre on the Right Bank. A
few of the actors in the company were professional actors, but most were
novices and amateurs. This was an
obstacle for producing and presenting quality public performances and the
general reception was tepid—except for praise for Chekhov’s own
performances.
The Théâtre de l’Atelier productions
were hastily put together with the troupe’s mediocre acting company. Stanislavsky’s son, Igor Alekseyev (1894-1975;
Stanislavsky’s birth name was Konstantin Sergeyevich Alekseyev), labeled them
“awful hackwork.” Alekseyev continued
that Chekhov “is an excellent actor but a bad director and a worthless
administrator.”
The next month, the actor-director
founded the Theatre of Chekhov, Boner and Company with Georgette Boner (1903-1998),
the Swiss German daughter of a Zürich millionaire, student of Max Reinhardt,
and director of the Deutsche Bühne (German Stage) in Paris whom Chekhov had met
in May. Boner, an acquaintance of Ksenia
Karlovna, became a lifelong friend of the Russian émigré and often served as
his financial backer. Boner edited the
manuscript of a prospective German publication on Chekhov’s Technique and wrote
Hommage an Michael Tschechow [Homage
to Michael Chekhov] in 1994.
The Chekhov-Boner company planned
a production of Twelfth Night based
on the staging Chekhov had created with Habima, as well as a dramatization of
Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote and
a production of Arthur Schnitzler’s Anatol. The actor-director had planned several
productions he wanted to stage in Moscow before he left, but having been unable
to follow through, he began using those plans for his French company—often in
simplified versions and with shortened preparation periods. (Remember that his Hamlet with MAT 2 took 13 months to rehearse, as most MAT
performances did—give or take a month or two—far more than Western European
shows, such as Reinhardt’s extravaganzas, allowed. Productions in the U.S., particularly
commercial shows (that is, Broadway), allowed even less time for rehearsals.)
With the help of Viktor Gromov
(1899-1975), a Russian actor, director, and writer Chekhov had taught in Moscow
at MAT 2, the émigré director staged and starred in a musical pantomime based
on some Russian folk tales by Leo Tolstoy which they called Le Château s’éveille [The Castle
awakens; the English title varies].
Chekhov’s hope was that the new
show, which opened on 9 November 1931 at the Théãtre de l’Avenue near the
Champs Élysées, would attract a large international audience. There was little spoken dialogue in the
performance in the belief that the symbolistic gestures would afford the
production a universal language comprehensible by both French and Russian viewers. Theatre
Guild Magazine, the organ of the New York City production organization,
said, for example, that “words are almost entirely excluded.”
The star and director of Château, guided by his understanding of
Steiner’s philosophy, had focused on the symbolic production effects and
movements. Theatergoers, however, weren’t taken with the mystical themes and
technical problems on opening night exacerbated their displeasure.
Some critics lauded the
presentation, which was subtitled an “experiment in rhythmical drama.” Theatre
Guild Magazine, for instance, had gone on to say:
There are
moments . . . when this combination of allegory, music, and geometric stage
sets . . . all tend to work the audience up into a sort of frenzy as though
they were themselves struggling against evil.
Most of the press, however, both
Parisian and foreign, reviewed Château negatively; the Russian journals especially were dismayed by the miscarriage of
Chekhov’s Russian experiment before a foreign audience. The director and star of the presentation was
most hurt, though, by the response of Sergey Volkonsky (1860–1937), a writer,
critic, theater theorist, and former director of the Imperial Theaters who was one
of the most prominent experts and teachers in Russia of the rhythmic movement
of Émil Jaques-Dalcroze (1865-1950), the Swiss composer, musician, and music
educator who developed Dalcroze Eurhythmics (not to be confused with Steiner’s
Eurythmy—though the two concepts are related).
Volkonsky (also spelled
Wolkonsky), who had a reputation for expertise in and appreciation for the
potentiality of rhythm in artistic expression, had come to a rehearsal of Le Château s’éveille and later “wrote
what turned out to be a scathing review.”
The émigré Russian director protested, “I had rarely had occasion to
read such merciless criticism.”
In any case, Chekhov himself
recorded, “With the exception of two or three kind reviews (in the French
press), the Russian newspapers rejected my ‘innovations’ indignantly and
demanded ‘real’ theatre.” Audiences
stayed away, and Château closed after
only a few performances.
The “outright and miserable failure”
of Château, in the director’s own
words, threw Chekhov into a depression and he was said to have suffered an
emotional crisis. He wrote to fellow
director and theatrical innovator Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874-1940) that “I
over-innovated to such extent that I over-frightened spectators of all
kinds.” He’s reported to have broken
down during one the performances.
In February 1932, at Gromov’s
suggestion. Chekhov went to Riga, Latvia (like Lithuania, its Baltic neighbor,
an independent nation at this time), to perform with the Latvian National
Theater at the Russian Drama Theatre in a repertory of The Inspector General, Erik
XIV, The Deluge, and a stage
adaptation of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s 1859 novel The Village of Stepanchikovo [Село Степанчиково и его обитатели – Selo Stepanchikovo i ego obitateli
– The Village Stepanchikovo and its inhabitants]. The Village of Stepanchikovo opened on
25 November 1932; it would be Chekhov’s last production at the Russian Drama
Theatre.
In productions of Aleksei Tolstoy’s historical drama The Death of
Ivan the Terrible (opening: 23 April 1932) and Hamlet (opening: 21
October 1932), based on his 1924 MAT 2 staging, with the Latvian National
Theatre in October, Chekhov, playing the title roles, spoke Russian on stage
while the rest of the cast responded in Latvian. Chekhov found the audiences in Riga
appreciative, which helped his mental and physical health to improve. He planned to write that German book on his
acting technique with Georgette Boner, who later came to Latvia to
collaborate with him.
During this time, the Latvian Actors Union asked Chekhov to organize an
acting school in Riga. With Gromov and
some Latvian theater artists, he took charge of the project, which coincided
with trips south to the independent nation of Lithuania at the invitation of Andrei
Zhilinsky (1893-1948), director
of the Kaunas State Theatre and a student of Chekhov’s at the MAT and MAT 2. (Kaunas served as the temporary capital of Lithuania
while Vilnius, the nation’s traditional capital, was under Polish control. There were large populations of Russians in
all the Baltic states, which formed the rationale for their Soviet annexation
after World War II.)
The Theatre School of the Latvian Actors Union opened in September 1932
and Chekhov taught there until the spring of 1934, contributing greatly to the
advancement of the newly-developing field of actor-training in Latvia. The teaching at the Riga school and the
work he’d been doing with the acting company at the Kaunas theater became the
foundation of the book Chekhov would write on the technique of the actor. With the Lithuanian actors, he did exercises,
improvisations, and what he called études,
which were special exercises and improvs specific to the early work on a play
or scene. When he was in Riga, he wrote
letters on acting to the actors in Kaunas and these became the notes for On
the Technique of Acting (American
version: To the Actor).
That May, Chekhov performed six roles in Chekhov Sketches,
dramatizations of some of his uncle’s short stories, in a single evening at the
Kaunas State Theatre. In November 1932,
he would take this solo tour-de-force to Estonia, and in April 1933, to Warsaw,
Poland. The rest of that year and into
the next, Chekhov traveled to Kaunas, frequently commuting back and forth to
Riga a few times a week. (It’s about a
165-mile/265-kilometer trip each way, perhaps three hours’ travel.)
He staged his Hamlet in Kaunas in October 1932, with Zhilinsky
in the title role and his wife, Vera Solovyova (1892-1986), as Gertrude. (Solovyova had played the same role in Moscow
in 1924 and her husband had played the First Player.) In March 1933, Chekhov also performed
Malvolio in Twelfth Night (with Zhilinsky in the cast as Sir Toby Belch
while serving as assistant director).
The Latvian National Opera in Riga
approached Chekhov and asked him to stage an opera for them. The Russian actor-director had never staged
an opera, but nonetheless, he began working with the company on Richard Wagner’s
Parsifal in November 1933; at the
same time, he was working with the actors at the Latvian National Theatre on Hamlet and Twelfth Night.
Then in January 1934, Chekhov
suffered a heart attack—angina pectoris—which put him in the hospital for over
a month; he was all of 42. He begged to
be released for a few hours a day to work on the opera, but his doctor
refused. (The theater director would
suffer severely from the aftermath of the attack for the rest of the
year.) Instead, Gromov, Chekhov’s
assistant on Parsifal, snuck into the
hospital at night and the two men would go into the corridor and under a dim,
blue night light, the director would go over his plans for the next day’s
rehearsal.
Thus, the National Opera
production was completed and opened on 14 March 1934. Chekhov got himself released from the
hospital for the final dress rehearsal and watched the performance from the
auditorium. The première was a gala
event and the performance was met with acclaim in the press and standing
ovations from the audience. The Latvian
opera company and Chekhov talked about future collaborations, but the plans
were never realized.
Even before Chekhov’s heart
attack, his situation in Lithuania was becoming difficult. As a result of a military coup in 1926, a
conservative authoritarian government was installed in Kaunas and one-party
rule under the Lithuanian Nationalist
Union was established. Andrei Zhilinsky,
although he was a native Lithuanian (born Andrius Oleka-Zhilinskas), was deeply
involved in the Russian theater in Kaunas and in the Russian community and
culture in the country. To the
nationalists, he was to blame for the “Russification” of Lithuania.
Zhilinsky’s association with
Chekhov made the chauvinistic press and anti-Russian elements in the society
attack the visiting artist from his first appearance on stage in Kaunas. By the time his stylized Inspector General opened on 26 September 1933, the nationalist
sentiment was firmly against him and the critics declared his grotesque staging
a manifestation of “communistic tendencies and propaganda.” The Inspector
General was Chekhov’s final production for Zhilinsky’s Kaunas State
Theatre; it became impossible for Chekhov to work in the country any
longer. This was, of course, ironic
since it was the communists who had hounded Chekhov out of Russia five years
earlier.
The criticisms spread to Latvia,
which was only slightly less nationalistic than its neighbor. A right-wing coup brought another
authoritarian government to power in Riga in May 1934. This is what ended the plans for the Russian
director to stage further work with the opera company. All other prospective projects were abandoned
as well. Chekhov’s health prevented him
from leaving Latvia immediately, however, so he retreated to the countryside to
rest, read, and study Anthroposophy.
Georgette Boner came from Paris to
Latvia in the summer of 1932 to work with Chekhov on the German acting
technique book. She edited and revised
the text and he rewrote it many times while he used her as a sounding board and
Chekhov “explained my complex theory of rhythm and composition and its
application to theatre” to her and “she elevated me to such philosophical
heights with her questions, advice and arguments, or brought me to my wit’s end
with the latest psychological thought, that I became apprehensive lest my
thoughts were altogether too naive.” In
the end, however, Chekhov was wasn’t happy with the manuscript and declined to
get it published.
In the spring of 1934, Chekhov and
Boner got together with Zhilinsky, Solovyova,
and some other former MAT artists to
form the Moscow Art Players. Leonid
Leonidov (1885–1983), a Russian-born Berlin theater impresario, had offered to
back a tour of The Inspector General to the United States. In the U.S., Sol Hurok (1888-1974), a
Russian-born producer and manager, produced the U.S. end of the tour, which
included the February-March 1935 run at Broadway’s Majestic Theatre of the
Moscow Art Players of Revisor (the transliterated Russian title of The
Inspector General, which was used for the New York City presentation) in
rep with Poverty Is No Crime by Aleksandr Ostrovsky, Strange Child
by Vasili Shkvarkin, Marriage by Nikolai Gogol, The White Guard
by Mikhail Bulgakov, The Deluge by Henning Berger, I Forgot by Anton Chekhov, and Enemies
by Boris Lavrenov.
The Soviet government threatened
to cancel plans to send a Moscow theater troupe to the U.S. if the Moscow Art
Players were allowed to perform on Broadway, but Hurok persisted. It was the first season of Russian and Soviet
plays to be presented in the U.S. and the program sold out and received good
reviews. Hurok extended the Players New
York run, originally scheduled for four weeks, for two additional weeks. After New York, the company took its rep of
Russian plays to Philadelphia and Boston.
While his troupe was performing on
Broadway, Chekhov met with members of the leftist Group Theatre, a company
devoted to the principles of Konstantin Stanislavsky. In 1935, the renowned theater company was
looking for new acting teachers and Chekhov was invited to come in for an
interview in February. After having seen
him perform, members like Stella Adler (1901-92), Sanford Meisner (1905-97),
and Robert Lewis (1909-97)—who all became highly regarded acting teachers
themselves—wanted to meet the Russian actor and director.
Lee Strasberg, famous now for
developing the Stanislavsky derivative known as the Method, wasn’t happy with
the notion of going outside the Group for teachers, but the others had been so
impressed with Chekhov’s work in the Moscow Art Players rep that they wanted to
learn from him. As Richard Brestoff, an
actor and teacher, put in his book The
Great Acting Teachers and Their Methods (1995), however: “the Group members
concluded that his style was so personal to him that it could not be taught or
used by others.” (Brestoff allowed that
this impression was “probably mistaken.”)
Another American theater artist of
note who saw Chekhov perform in the Moscow Art Players Broadway début was young
ingénue Beatrice Straight (1914-2001).
Straight, a member of the aristocratic Whitney family, was born into
wealth and influence, but she wasn’t a dilettante as an actress. (Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, 1875-1942, the
founder of the Whitney Museum of American Art, was another member of the line
by marriage.) She studied her art
seriously and when she saw Chekhov’s work, she suggested he start an acting
school at her family’s estate, Dartington Hall, in Devonshire, England.
Dartington Hall, which dates to
the 14th century, was purchased in 1925 by the American millionaire Leonard
Elmhirst and his wife Dorothy, Straight’s step-father and mother. They
established an experimental progressive community at the estate and Chekhov
opened the Chekhov Theatre Studio there in October 1936.
At the end of the Moscow Art
Players’ U.S. tour, Zhilinsky, Solovyova, and some of the other artists
remained in the United States, and Chekhov—now Michael—set up in England. His studio started with about 20 students
from nations all around the Western world, such as England, the U.S., Canada,
New Zealand, Australia, Norway, Germany, Austria, and Lithuania.
The Russian actor-director-acting
teacher ran and taught at the Chekhov Theatre Studio at Dartington Hall until
1938. The threat of World War II, which
broke out in Central Europe the next year with the German invasion of Poland, with
whom Britain had a mutual defense treaty, in September 1939, would force the
United Kingdom to declare war on the German Reich.
In February 1936, the communist
government of the USSR disbanded MAT 2, Chekhov’s old home base. On 7 August 1938, Konstantin Stanislavsky
died in Moscow of a heart attack he’d suffered five days earlier. He was 75 years old.
Chekhov, Straight, and the
Elmhirsts pulled up stakes in Devonshire and moved the school, with many of the
current students and teachers, to Ridgefield, Connecticut, in December
1938. It remained there until March 1942
when it disbanded as a consequence of the World War II draft. (The United States had entered the war on
Japan on 8 December 1941, and Germany and Italy on 11 December.)
When Beatrice Straight accepted
her Oscar for her supporting performance in Network
in 1977, she thanked Michael Chekhov in her speech. Straight, with Robert Cole, a writer and actor, as executive manager, launched the
Michael Chekhov Studio in New York City in 1980.
At the studio, Chekhov organized
the Chekhov Theater Studio Players. The
troupe’s first production was a dramatization of Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed. It played at Broadway’s Lyceum Theatre in
October and November 1939, but the critical reception was mostly negative. The New York Times reported that “it comes close to being a
travesty.” In December 1941,
Chekhov and Shdanoff co-directed the Studio Players in Twelfth Night at Broadway’s Little Theatre to much better
notices. Straight played Viola, Ford
Rainey played sir Toby Belch, Hurd Hatfield was Sir Andrew Aguecheek, and Yul
Brynner was one of the Illyrian residents.
In October and November 1940,
Chekhov and the company made a 10,000-mile tour of the length of the East Coast
with Twelfth Night and The Cricket on the Hearth. They played small towns in high schools and
community centers and created a sensation.
The Studio Players made two more such extensive tours in 1941 (a
stylized staging of King Lear) and
1942.
Just ahead of the closure of the
Ridgefield school, in October 1941, Chekhov started teaching professional
classes in Manhattan at the Chekhov Theatre New York Studio.
In October 1942, Chekhov left New York City for Los Angeles and the next year, he appeared in his first
Hollywood film, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s Song
of Russia (released on 1944), followed by In Our Time from Warner Bros. in 1944. Life
and Encounters, his second autobiography, was published in the Russian
periodical Novyi Zhurnal [Новый журнал – New journal] the same
year.
In 1945, Chekhov played his
best-known movie part, Dr. Alexander Brulov, the Freudian psychoanalyst of
Ingrid Bergman’s character in Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound. He was nominated
for an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor in the 18th Academy Awards in 1946. His favorite film role came the next year, Solomon
Levy, the Jewish father in Abie’s Irish
Rose, from United Artists (1946).
That same year, Michael Chekhov became a naturalized U.S. citizen.
In August of that year, the actor
and director published the Russian version of On the Technique of Acting.
(The abridged English version, To
the Actor, came out in 1953 with an introduction by Yul Brynner, 1920-85;
the full text in English was released in 1991.)
In 1948, the esteemed acting
teacher held professional classes for actors in the film industry at the home
of fellow émigré actor Akim Tamiroff (1899-1972), born in Georgia of Armenian
heritage. It was here that his influence
and concepts spread through Hollywood to inspire many now-famous
movie actors (many of whose names I dropped at the opening of this profile).
On 30 September 1955, Michael
Chekhov suffered a fatal heart attack in Beverly Hills, California. He was 64.
He was the first modern acting theorist to develop a comprehensive
program of actor training as an alternative to the Stanislavsky System, Despite his unfamiarity outside the worlds of
acting and directing, his ideas and techniques had an immense influence on
stage and film artists during his lifetime and afterwards.
In 1998, his fellow Russian George
Shdanoff (1905-98), an acting coach, released the documentary From Russia to Hollywood: The 100 Year
Odyssey of Chekhov and Shdanoff, which profiles Chekhov and is narrated by
Mala Powers (1931-2007), a film and television actress who was a student and
close friend and associate of Chekhov’s, and Gregory Peck (1916-2003), another
Chekhov student and co-star of Spellbound.
The regard of Michael Chekhov’s
work, both as a working artist (acting and directing) and as a teacher and
theorist, has grown since his death—indeed, in the past few decades. Actors like Johnny Depp and Anthony Hopkins
have acknowledged Chekhov's influence on their acting on Inside the Actors Studio, the cable TV show. Other posthumous releases, attesting to this
renewed interest, include expanded editions of On the Technique of Acting in 1991 and To the Actor (with a forward by Simon Callow in addition to
Brynner’s preface) in 2002. The English
translation of The Path of the Actor
came out in 2005, the 50th anniversary of Chekhov’s death, and selected
lectures were released on CD in 2004.
[I’m going to
repeat my explanation of the Russian names and words in the text of “Michael Chekhov”:
Because the Russian (Cyrillic) alphabet doesn’t align with the Latin alphabet
or English letter sounds at all precisely, there are many ways to transliterate
Russian into English. (This doesn’t even
count transliterations into other languages.
You’ve all seen how Chekhov’s family name is spelled differently
depending on which language into which it’s being transliterated: Chekhov for English, Tchekhoff for
French, and Tschechow for
German. There are even more spellings
for other languages that didn’t appear in this post.)
[For the
Russian names, I’ve tried to use a consistent transliteration of the Cyrillic
spellings, but I have used the common spellings for names that have become
standardized in English (usually because the bearers of those names have become
well known or have immigrated here), such as Vladimir Sokoloff (instead of
Sokolov), a Russian-born actor who had a long career in Hollywood. I haven’t routinely supplied the Cyrillic
spellings of Russian names except in a few instances—mostly because there are
so many, it would unnecessarily clutter up the text. I did include the Russian spellings for a few
names where I thought it would be useful for those ROTters who can read Russian.
[For the titles
of Russian plays (or Russian translations of foreign plays) and for
Russian-language books, journals, and articles I reference in the post, I have
included (where I could determine them) the Cyrillic spelling, the English
transliteration, and the English translation.
(Note that many Russian titles have several alternative English
versions, even titles of some works published in English.) I did this so that readers who are interested
can do a search for more information on these works and often that requires
having the original form of the title—even if you can’t read it yourself.)
[As with the
names, I have tried to use the same transliteration system for all Russian
titles and words so that they are as consistent as I can make them. (In several cases, unhappily, I wasn’t able
to find the Russian original of the titles—and in many of the same instances,
the English title varies depending on who’s doing the translating. Unfortunately, this situation makes it hard
to look up titles and names, especially in printed reference works.]
